Leaving Reality

I'm the type of person who, if I have a problem with you, I'm gonna say it to your face. Oh, believe that. 'Cause that's real. I'm not gonna act all sweet and then talk shit about you behind your back, because I'm not like that. I'm not fake. You know what I mean?

Do you really?

All right, then. Here's what happened.

It was maybe an hour before midnight at the Avalon Nightclub in Chapel Hill, and the Miz was feeling nervous. I didn't pick up on this at the time—I mean, I couldn't tell. To me he looked like he's always looked, like he's looked since his debut season, back when I first fell in love with his antics: all bright-eyed and symmetrical faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring professional wrestler he happens to be and a smile you could spot as midwestern American in a blimp shot of a soccer stadium. He had on a crisp, cool shirt and was sporting, in place of his old floppy bangs, a new sort-of mousse-Mohawk, just a little ridgelet of product-hardened hair emerging from his buzz cut. In the parking lot, just past the Dumpster on which some citizen had written in white spray paint MEAT MARKET—BITCHES, a chalkboard sign told passersby that the Miz was inside, if any felt ready to party. He was whipping back gratis shots of some stuff that looked like flavored brandy and chatting with undergraduate girls, more and more of whom were edging closer and closer every minute. As he grinned and chatted with them, he looked so utterly guileless and unselfconscious as to seem incapable of nervousness. Granted, I'd already joined him and the owner, Jeremy (who was a good bro of the Miz's), in doing some generous shots, one of which the Miz had marked with a toast that involved his trademark saying, his motto, as it were—"Be good. Be bad. Be Miz "—prompting a skinny, bearded dude who was doing the shots with us, as well as several on his own, and whose surname I took to be Flangey, to blurt out something that sounded like "Orbe FLANGEY...." But I hadn't done that many, and I thought the Miz looked pumped. Later, however, he would write in his online diary that he'd been nervous, for the simple reason that I was there, with my notepad and my judgments and my dubious but sincere claim of being a "hard-core fan" of MTV's The Real World and its various spin-off reality series (of which the Miz is perhaps the best known and most beloved cast member). And although these club-appearance things are usually cool, are typically bumpin'-bumpin', "sometimes, like, only eight people show," and the scene gets grim. What if tonight were like that and then it were written about in a magazine? That would be a fiasco. Or, as the Miz might put it—has put it, in fact, in describing a separate incident on that selfsame diary—a fiascal.

He needn't have worried. The place filled up so fast I thought maybe a bus had arrived. It was like those Asian noodles that explode when they hit hot oil. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, there was hardly room to lift your drink. It was jumpin'-jumpin'. There were loads of the sort of girls who, when dudes ask them to show their breasts and asses, show their breasts and asses. One girl wanted her right breast signed; the Miz was given a Magic Marker. He showed, I must say, admirable concentration on his penmanship. Another of these girls—a Hooters employee who was saving up for college in a not-too-nearby town—had driven a long way alone. "I'm here just to see the Miz," she said, but there was a line to talk to him now, of both chicks and dudes, and she'd seen that the Miz and I were bros, so she kicked it with me for a while.

"Are you a fan of the show?" I asked her.

"Oh yeah," she said, "I've already seen MJ here, and Cameran" (two other, more recent Real World faves). "There's been a bunch of Real World people here."

"I've been watching it since high school," I said.

"Oh, me too!" she said.

Then I reflected that, for me, this meant since the show debuted; for her, it meant since last season; which in turn caused me to reflect mournfully on what a poseur she was. Did she even remember the Miz's cast? Probably she knew him only from The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, which—although he is awesome on that—is not the best place to get insight into what makes him such a powerful fun-generator.

On the other hand, this young lady was a veteran of the club-appearance scene, and tonight was my first time. If a little hoochie tunnel leading straight to the Miz's presence hadn't opened right at that moment, causing her to sprint from my side, I was going to ask her, "What's it all about?" Because this was the thing I'd heard rumors of, what I'd come to get a peep at: this wonderful little bubble economy that The Real World and its—in my view—less entertaining mutant twin, Road Rules (essentially Real World in an RV, for all you Kaczynskis out there), have created around themselves.

I don't know how ready you are to admit your familiarity with the show and everything about it, so let me go through the motions of pretending to explain how it operates. Once a Real World season ends, the cast members who have emerged during the filming as the popular ones (a status that can be achieved through hotness, all-American likability, and/or unusually blatant behavioral disorders) are invited into a shadow world that exists just below the glare of the series itself. This world has many rooms of its own: club appearances (like this one in Chapel Hill); spring break (which is essentially an amplified version of the club appearance, at one or another beach resort, with several bars and clubs jammed into several consecutive days of straight wildin'-wildin'); "speaking engagements" (at colleges, or to youth groups or antismoking groups, or what have you—especially advantageous here is if you've revealed some side of yourself on the show, such as gayness, alcoholism, bulimia, unhappiness over your breast implants, severe and unprovoked instantaneous anger, neediness, fainting when you see large ships, or crypto-racism, that speaks to a certain specialty population); um, product launches; and finally, most important of all, the highly visible and jealously guarded spots on The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, where former cast members team up to compete for...oh, fuck it! You know how it works. (It's a bit like a ten-times-as-excellent version of Battle of the Network Stars—and of course, this being the Year of Our Lord 2005, a few of The Real World/Road Rules Challenge standouts, among them the Miz, have now been cast on a revived edition of...Battle of the Network Stars.) Point being, you never really leave The Real World, not if you're blessed with ripped abs or a boomin' rack. The agent who sets up most of these gigs, a guy named Brian J. Monaco—who's been doing it for eleven years and is "the one we trust," according to the Miz and every former Real World cast member with whom I spoke—he told me that there are even instances of unpopular Real Worlders and Road Rulesers "hustling" on the circuit, desperately offering themselves to club owners who don't really want them, asking only "part of the door." And on The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, which has evolved its own shadow shadow culture, in which cast members transmit messages to one another via silk-screened T-shirts and nurse transseasonal grudges and self-generate weird rivalries (e.g., veterans versus new guys) that then become official story lines, I'd even seen two girls rend the veil and fight over something that happened out there, in the "real world," one accusing the other of stealing speaking-engagement business away from her by telling a college administrator that she, the accuser, was "quite demanding" and cursed too much. A whole little picture bloomed in my mind, of all those former cast members out there, like a Manson family with perfect teeth, still hanging out, still feuding, still drunkenly hittin' that (a bunch of them even lived on the same block in Los Angeles, I'd been told), all of them just going around being somebody who'd been on The Real World, which is, of course, a show where you just be yourself. I mean, my God, bros. The purity of that....

A lot of the young people yelling questions into the Miz's face seemed mystified by the particulars of it all. They'd ask him, "What are you doing here?" and the Miz, who's a pro, would always say, "Avalon brought me here." Apparently stunned, they'd ask him, "Are you getting paid to be here?" And the Miz would say, "Yeah, I do all right." And they'd say, "Just to party?"

Some of the youngsters badgered me, thinking maybe I was the Miz's manager or something. "Does he go all over doing this?" two sophomore dudes in polo shirts wanted to know. "Oh yeah," I said, "he's huge." Then they asked me, "Why are you here?" And I said, "I'm writing about him." And they said, "What about him?"

We turned and looked at him then, as though in his face we might find the answer. He was all golden-y. For a moment, it seemed we were unified in the humor and puzzlement of it all. There was music on that sounded like a rabbit's heartbeat in the core of your brain. There was a gangster-style guy onstage, sort of conducting the crowd, making them sway from side to side with his hand. "Are you an undercover cop?" one of the two dudes asked me. When I said I wasn't, he said, "Then why is your hair so short?"

It gave me pleasure when the Miz refused to buy those two little fuckers beer.

He'd broken away from his fans for a minute and was resting with his back to the bar. One couldn't help but marvel at how fresh he looked. He'd been drinking since he got off the plane. The owner had picked him up and whisked him off to a cookout, where everybody did tequila shots. Then there'd been stops at a couple of bars in town, at the first of which I found him slurping martinis (an activity the Miz referred to as "a little pregame warm-up"). For a minute there, before he decided to put on his "big-boy pants," the Miz had wondered whether he'd even make it to the club. And not only that, but things had been even wilder the night before, in Austin, where the Miz had done a tag-team club appearance with MJ and Landon, two male cast members from the Real World season that was currently airing on MTV. There were, like, 280 people at that one. It was thumpin'-thumpin'.

It is a truism by now that every Real World cast features some combination of recurring types—the slutty one, the sweet one, the racially ambiguous one, the gay one, the slutty-sweet southern one, etc.—and MJ and Landon were two new versions of the Miz, if you savvy. They were super-ripped white guys from tiny towns who didn't know poop from peanuts, multiculturally speaking, but who were soon to learn, and in learning, they'd grow. Yeah, well, the Miz invented that shit, bros. MJ and Landon took the whole typological thing to another level, by looking disconcertingly alike, with tight curly blond cherub hair and unblinking eyes that had never known fear. They horrified me, even before Landon got drooling drunk and half-naked on the show and approached his fellow housemates with a butcher knife behind his back. Naturally, they'd both been superpopular, and you can bet they'd been doing a ton of club appearances. The Miz has been doing that for years.

I was like, "Mike" (that's his real name), "doesn't this lifestyle wear you down?"

He goes, "Yeah, but I take care of myself. First thing, dude: I don't mix my drinks. If I'm drinking vodka, I keep with vodka. Shots make that hard, though. Somebody hands you a shot, it's hard to be like, 'Can I have something else?' But for the most part..."

"But what about your soul?" I said. "Does it take a toll on your soul?" He looked down at his drink.

Psych! I'm just shittin' y'all. I didn't ask him that.

Some girls came up and started grilling the Miz about the Real World/Road Rules Challenge season then showing on MTV. Was so-and-so really a cold bitch? Was so-and-so really as nice as he seemed? Was the Miz's team going to win this season?

The Miz pursed his lips and slowly shook his head. He'd been here before—he's here all the time. You can't give away secrets about upcoming episodes. One of the girls said, "There's one I don't like. Who's that girl, the one—not Veronica, but she kinda reminds you of Veronica. Kinda short. Kinda busty brunet."

The Miz looked perpled. Who could look like Veronica? Vicious little Veronica, queen of the bathtub threesome, that petite and pneumatic perhaps lesbian who almost fell to her death when Julie the psychotic Mormon fucked with her safety harness during a heated rope-race challenge?

"You mean Tina," I said.

"Yeah, Tina!" the girl said.

The Miz looked at me. He goes, "Damn, dude...you're good."

"Yeah, well..."

···

There was a time when people liked to point out that reality TV isn't really real. "They're just acting up for the cameras." "That's staged." "The producers are telling them what to do!" "I hate those motherfuckers!" and so forth. Then there was a sort of deuxième naïveté when people thought, Maybe there is something real about it. "Because you know, we can be narcissistic like that." "It's our culture." "It gives us a window onto certain..." And such things as those. But I would argue that all these different straw people I've invented are missing the single most interesting thing about reality TV, which is the way it has successfullyappropriated reality.

In the beginning, back in '92, when The Real World debuted, establishing in the process the pattern on which all future reality shows would be based, the game was rather crude and obvious—was a character "aware of the cameras," or did he or she momentarily "forget about the cameras"? Those were your subtle shades. That was before the genre itself went kudzu on the whole televised landscape, till pretty soon everybody had a mom or ex-girlfriend or brother on a show; that was before being cast on a reality show became a rite of passage, like getting your first apartment or your calf implants. (I switched on one new show a few months ago, Richard Branson's The Rebel Billionaire, and found one of my oldest childhood friends having tea on top of a hot-air balloon with that weird and whispery mogul-fawn, Sir Richard, then saying things I'd never heard him say but had heard so many others say in identically serious tones, things like "I am not going to lose a second of this experience worrying about tomorrow.")

Came a point at which the people being cast on the shows were for the most part people who thrilled back home to watch the shows, people (especially among the younger generation) whose very consciousnesses had been formed by the shows. Somewhere, far below, a switch was flipped. Now, when you watch a reality show—when you follow The Real World, for instance—you're not watching a bunch of people who've been hurled into some contrived scenario and are getting filmed, you're watching people who are being on a reality show. This is now the plot of all reality shows, no matter their cooked-up themes. And here's the lovely, surprising thing about this shift toward greater self-consciousness, greater self-reflexivity, more uniform complicity in the falseness of it all—it made things more real. Because, of course, people being on a reality show is precisely what these people are! Think of it this way: If you come to my office and film me doing my job (I don't have one, but that only makes this thought experiment more rigorous), you wouldn't really see what it was like to watch me doing my job, because you'd be there watching me (Heisenberg uncertainty principle, interior auto-mediation, and so forth). But now dig this: What if my job were to be on a reality show, being filmed, having you watching me, interior auto-mediation, and so forth? What if that weremy reality, bros? Are your faces melting yet?

This is where we are, as a people. And not just that. No, the other exciting thing that's happened—really just in the last few years—involves the ramping acceleration of a self-reinforcing system that's been in place since the birth of reality TV. See, because the population from which producers and casting directors can draw to get bodies onto these shows has come to comprise almost exclusively persons who "get" reality shows and are therefore hip to the fact that one is all but certain to be humiliated and irrevocably compromised on such a show, the producers and casting directors, who've always had to be careful to screen out candidates who are overly self-aware and therefore prone to freeze up and act all "dignified" in front of the cameras, are forever having to work harder and harder to locate "spontaneous" individuals, people who, as the Miz says approvingly, "just can't help being who they are."

Well, the effects of this sequence—by which casting directors must get crazier and crazier with their choices, resulting, once the show has aired and had its effect on the country, in a casting demographic in which one must scrape the barrel that much harder to find people who'd even go near a reality show—remained, for many years, gradual and nearly imperceptible. But now...bros, have you watched TV recently? From what can be gathered, they're basically emptying out group homes into these studios. It has all gotten so very real. Nobody's acting anymore. I mean, sure, they're acting, but it's not like they're ever not acting. That's what I'm trying to say.

And I just don't see how you can't love it. They're all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching. Using weird phrases that nobody uses, except everybody uses them now. Constantly talking about our "goals." Throwing carbonic acid on our castmates because they used our special cup and then calling our mom to say, in a baby voice, "People don't get me here." Walking around half-naked with a butcher knife behind our backs. Telling it like it is, y'all. (What-what!) And never passive-aggressive, no. Saying it straight to your face. That's right. But crying, crying, crying. My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows of the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are too many of them—too many shows and too many people on the shows. And I just get so exhausted with my countrypeople—you know the ones, the ones you run into who are all like, "Oh gosh, reality TV? I've never even seen it. Is it really that interesting?" I mean, I'm sorry, but go starve. To me that's about as noble as being like, "Oh, Nagasaki? I've never even heard of that!" This is us, bros. This is our nation. A people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.

···

The club appearance wasn't enough. I asked them to dinner—the Miz, Melissa, and Coral—because I had to know for myself if they were real. If all those years spent being themselves for a living had left them with selves to be, or if they'd maybe begun to phase out of existence, like on a Star Trek episode.

But then, bros, I got distracted. You know how it is, when you're kickin' it. I got to telling them about some of my all-time fave moments. I talked about the time Randy and Robin were drinking on the upstairs porch—it was the San Diego season. Big Ran was teaching Robin about his personal philosophical system, involving a positive acceptance of epistemological uncertainty, a little thing he liked to call "Agnostics." When Robin (I thought very sweetly) complimented Ran on his philosophical side, which she hadn't noticed up till then, Big Ran goes: "I have a lot of knowledge to share."

I liked Big Ran. He was who he was—it's like the Miz said, he couldn't help it. He was the kind of guy who was always telling you what kind of guy he was. A few months ago, I almost had a brush with him. A travel company announced there was a Real World cruise planned, in the Caribbean. Big Ran and Trishelle (greatest southern slut in Real World history) were going to be on it. I got tickets. I got all excited. But, bros, in the end, I got mind-fucked. They canceled the cruise. I don't know if it was for lack of ticket sales or what, but for a brief period, I wondered if maybe I'd been the only person to purchase a ticket. And then I imagined a scenario in which, for some nitpicky contractual reason, the cruise line had been forced to go through with the package anyway, and it was just me, Big Ran, and Trishelle out there on the seas, drifting around on our ghost ship, eating foam from the chaise cushions. Sure, there'd have been some tears, some wrestling and whatnot, but in the end...

The Miz, Coral, and Melissa didn't remember that—they didn't remember Big Ran saying, "I have a lot of knowledge to share." I got the sense they don't really watch the show, not since they were on it. "It's hard," said Coral, " 'cause you know better. You know that that ain't really like that."

It took me about twenty minutes to put together what was off about our interview: I was enjoying it. Ordinarily, I'm pretty freaked out interrogating strangers, certain I'll freeze and forget to ask what'll turn out to be the only important question. But since we'd all sat down, I'd been totally, totally at ease. Then I saw that this light, this tremulous, bluish light playing over their faces, was the very light by which I knew them best. I'd instinctively brought them to this place in Beverly Hills, Blue on Blue, that has open cabanas around a pool, and we were lounging in one, and the light was shining on their amazing, poreless skin. How many times had I sat with them like this, by pools and Jacuzzis? How often had we chilled like this, just drinking and making points? Thousands of times. My nervous system had somehow convinced itself we'd all been on the show together; that we were on the show right then. I believed I knew them well.

"Yeah," the Miz said, "that's both the good and the bad about being on a reality-TV show." He was drinking a vodka drink (everyone knows clear liquor is easier over time on the colon, prostate, etc.—plus, as the Miz points out, it's lower in calories). "We'll be eating, and it's 'That muthafucka right THERE! What's up, son?' See, they're not gonna do that to Tom Cruise. They're not even going to do that to a B- or C-list actor. But they feel like they know us, so they can come up to us and say whatever they want...."

I was about to point out to the Miz that he might seem less approachable to folks like me if he'd quit taking money to party with us at places like the Avalon Nightclub, but that seemed like a real dick thing to say to a guy who's given me so much joy over the years. And anyway, Melissa and Coral agreed with him.

For those of you stubbornly perpetrating like you don't know who Melissa and Coral are, let me blow through a couple of tedious IDs. Coral was in the Miz's cast, the "Back to New York" season. In fact, they're sort of my generation's Ozzie and Harriet, though as far as I can tell (and to the great chagrin of millions) they've never been "romantic." Their friendship started off shaky. At breakfast one morning, back in 2001, conversation turned to that trusty standby "white people and black people." The Miz let slip that his dad doesn't like to hire black people at his Mr. Hero franchise back in northern Ohio because the inner-city schools there are bad, and black people there are "slow." Coral—who's black and beautiful and possesses a raw and somewhat terrifying intelligence—wasn't really feeling that. The season's main plotline became one of Coral mercilessly making Mike feel like a fool (which he already did). But then the two met up again onThe Real World/Road Rules Challenge, succeeded in winning the first season's competition together, and although they haven't yet produced the glorious multiracial triplets I feel are inevitably in their future, they do manifest a mutual and patently authentic affection. Coral calls the Miz "Mikey."

Melissa (who, I can't help innocently adding, is blessed with the most extraordinary upper lip) has been living with Coral, and they are best friends. Melissa is black and Filipina. She was on the New Orleans season. She's the one we all saw go off on Julie that time, for the speaking-engagement shadiness (my first clue thatThe Real World was a real world). Melissa and Julie had never really been superclose, not since Melissa asked Julie to hand her a pudding cup one time, and Julie said, "See, back where I'm from, if somebody asked us to do that, we'd say, 'What color do I look like?'"

The Miz, Coral, and Melissa had just come back from a speaking engagement at Texas Christian University. It was the three of them and David Burns (another former Real Worlder who, I'm told, is opening a bar in Myrtle Beach called Reality Bites that will be staffed by former cast members—and I might just drop in here the little facty-facty that I live an hour from Myrtle Beach, so y'all bitches can sit on that). Anyhoo, they did their thing, shared some knowledge, and then, at the end, students were invited to come forward and ask questions. This is the typical format. Also typical is that most students who come forward have the same question to ask, namely, "Can I have a hug?" So the Miz has taken to making an announcement before the question part. He'll say, "Afterwards, we're going to have a meet-'n'-greet. We can do hugs and pictures there. So don't ask about hugs." Okay, so, the question thing was going good. They were almost out of time. The Miz said, "Last question. Something saucy." This girl got up and goes, "I understand you're not going to do any pictures or any hugs after the show, but I was wondering if I could just sit on your face."

The Miz was staring, obviously still working with it. "I was really quite stunned," he said. "This is TexasChristian University."

I wish—for your sake, bros—that the Miz, Coral, and Melissa had turned out to be more fucked-up. I'd love to have been able to give you that. I know I said a lot of out-there things about people on TV—and it's not like I take any of it back—but all three of them were cool. And smart. (Well, I mean, smart might not be a word with which I'd saddle the Miz, but nice and relatively together? Totally.) For an hour, I worked hard to force onto them my idea about post—Real World existence being essentially a form of fun slavery. I told them what Real World über-agent Brian Monaco had told me, that he's starting to hear from former cast members, 28-year-olds burnt out on the bar/club/speaking-engagement/Challenge circuit, who are coming to him and being like, "Bri, what do I do? I've got nothing on my résumé!" But that doesn't really apply to any of the three I took to dinner. The Miz has his sweet wrestling deal; Coral hosts shows on MTV; Melissa stars on another show, on the Oxygen channel, called Girls Behaving Badly.

I suppose I could baselessly predict that none of this stuff will work out for any of them (though it probably will); I could maybe point out that "reality fame"—as opposed to "acting fame" or another more legitimate type of entertainment notoriety—is sort of a trap. As Monaco put it, "I've seen these kids go to premieres with movie stars, and they get, like, a huge response on the carpet, but unless somebody's paying for the drinks, they can't afford their own." Even on the Real World/Road Rules Challenge, they get "like, $1,000 a week." And keep in mind that The Real World and its various spores have been, off and on, MTV's top-rated shows for about a decade. That's a straight screw job. A while back, some of the kids even hired lawyers and tried to band together against the network. But as the Miz put it, "Why would they pay us more? There are so many of us. They're just like, 'You won't do it? Oh, okay. I'll call so-and-so.'" Plus, there's that damned phenomenon again, the way we feel like we know these kids. Who'd want the Miz hosting TRL? That'd be like your brother hosting TRL. You'd be like, "Oh, there's my bro, Mike"—flip.

So mainly, we talked about Julie, from the New Orleans cast. She's the one who said that weird racial thing to Melissa; she's the one accused of trying to fuck with Melissa's money; she's the one who nearly manslaughtered Veronica on the rope-race challenge by trying to disengage Veronica's safety harness at a height of eighteen stories. (That was another great moment—the whole cast was screaming at Julie; the host even had a megaphone; they were all like, "No, Julie! No!" Veronica was sobbing and screaming. But Julie just gritted her teeth and kept tugging away, bros!) Julie has rediscovered her Mormon faith. Watching her now on the Challenge is wild. She's always praying to herself while she's scaling the rock wall or whatever. But then, when one of the challenges is on, she jumps up and down and clenches her fists and shrieks like a woman with devils inside her. She's hands-down one of my all-time fave cast members. Mostly, the talk about Julie went like this.

ME: Have they ever had a tranny on the show?

CORAL: Not that we > know of. But maybe...

MELISSA: Maybe Julie?

CORAL: I saw her balls! I saw them!

MIZ: But the producers want more...people that people can relate to.

CORAL: Dude, there's some trannies that watch The Real World!

ME: Coral, the whole country watches The Real World.

CORAL: [squinting] Yeah, but it's funny, you know—they perpetrate like they don't.

Coral was lighting cigarettes and then passing them to me. She also let me see the spider tattoo on her foot (to commemorate the spider that bit her there a few seasons back, causing her to have an allergic reaction, which in turn contributed to her and the Miz's team losing the Challenge).

I want you to know that, on two separate instances, when the subject came up of whether Coral's mind-clobbering breasts are real, she grabbed them (somewhat violently), squeezed them together while pushing them up from below, and sort of shook them. Were they real? I don't know. Are the Blue Ridge Mountains real?

Things were maybe winding down when I was like, "Hey, Coral, what did you mean earlier, when you said that thing about how you don't watch the show 'cause you know that that ain't like that?"

The Miz jumped in. (I noticed that, if you ask the Miz a question, Coral answers, and vice versa.)

MIZ: Say we're talking right here. There'd be, like, a cameraman right here. There'd be a light guy right here. A director. And there's, like, five people standing right there, [around] the conversation that you're in. So it's like, we know what they're doing.... We also know that, when you're in interview, they're asking you questions. A type of question would be, like, "Do you think anyone's talking about you?"

ME: "They" are asking you questions?

MIZ: Yeah.

CORAL: There's a confessional.... You're required to do an hour of confessional a week, and there's also interviews that you have every week. And the person who's interviewing you is a psychiatrist.

ME: Are you serious?

MIZ: Yep, swear to God. Dr. Laura.

CORAL: Dr. Laura.

MELISSA: Dr. Laura.

CORAL: Who I love.

ME: From the show?

MIZ: Well, from our show.

ME: Not the Dr. Laura from...

MELISSA: Dr. Laura Schlessinger? That would be hilarious....

I'd suspected there were puppeteers involved in The Real World, invisibly instigating "drama," but to think that the network had just gone for it and hired a shrink? One who, as the kids went on to assure me, was involved not only in manipulating the cast during shooting but also in the casting process itself? And she's worked on other shows? This explained so much, about The Real World, about all of it. I mean, when I wrote that shit earlier about how the casting people have made the shows crazier and crazier, I didn't know I was right about any of that, bros! But this Dr. Laura person is an unacknowledged legislator of the real world. Turns out she's a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, which is good, when you think about it, because psychologists don't have to take the Hippocratic oath, and she's definitely, definitely done me some harm. Dig it: Dr. Laura Korkoian. No fucking chance I'm going to call her. She'd hypnotize me and talk me into jumping out the window of my hotel room, like she's no doubt done to dozens before.

No, I think I'll picture the Miz instead. I'll see him as he was when I was walking out of Avalon, when we said good-bye. He was dancing with that girl whose breast he had signed. They were grinding. The night had gone well. And he saw that I was leaving and gave me a wave and a look, like, "You're takin' off?" And I was like, "Yeah, gotta go!" And he was like, "Cool, bro!" and then he went back to dancing. The colored lights were on his face. People were watching. He was lovin' it. And in that moment, I thought it was awfully hard to think anything bad about the Miz. Remember senior year in college? Remember what it was like? Partying was the only thing you had to worry about, and when you went out, you could feel everybody thinking you were cool. The whole idea of being a young American seemed fun. Remember that? I don't, either. But the Miz remembers. He figured out a way never to leave that place. Bless him, bros.

Oh, I know you're like, "Dude, but you're being intellectually incoherent here! You made some amazing points, but you should be using your journalistic perch to advocate a heroic, even monastic disengagement from this whole horrifying anticulture! Turn away, bro! Beauty is not there! You need to quit saying 'It's like we're all living in a reality show' and just fucking accept that you're watching too much reality TV! Why can't you do that? Why can't you fight it?"

Yeah. And you know what? I might even have listened to you, if you had just said it to my face.

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